The night Barack Obama got elected, my wife and I watched returns with friends and then got in the car to drive back home. On Carrollton Avenue near Claiborne Avenue, we saw a depressingly familiar sight: a young black man getting handcuffs applied by officers from the New Orleans Police Department.

We had no idea what the man had done, but my knee-jerk reaction was that he should have been in front of a television watching history unfold. If he's around years from now, he'll have the most pathetic story when he's asked where he was the night the White House color line was broken.

Last week, while the nation's attention was focused on the inauguration in Washington, D.C., Kelly and I were honeymooning in Hawaii, where we found an island community ecstatic over the historic rise of its native son. We flew back to New Orleans, read about the murders committed when we were gone and Kelly asked me once more if I think a Barack Obama administration is going to change all this.

She's generally more skeptical than I am, and since I first suggested that the election of a black president had the potential to change everything, she's asked me to reconcile that belief with the headlines.

While we were away, three black boys were accused of killing a French Quarter bartender. Do I think Obama being in the White House is going to stop such crimes from being committed?

I don't believe the new president has a magic wand. Nor do I think he, nor any other person of note, has the miraculous ability to instantly convert criminals into peaceable and productive citizens. However, I do believe that his being in office can make young schoolchildren aware of their own potential for greatness, and that's a crime-fighting measure in and of itself.

Let's accept it as fact that a person can't become what he can't imagine. Far too many young people growing up on the streets of New Orleans and in other urban environments across the country can't imagine themselves doing anything other than moving drugs and engaging in gun play. And, heretofore, even those young people who weren't lured by dangerous streets couldn't imagine themselves where Obama is now.

Stanford psychologist Claude Steele coined the phrase "stereotype threat" to describe the difficulty people have when they're made to believe that their race or gender is notoriously bad at a particular task. Black students, according to his research, perform more poorly when they're told a test measures their intelligence than they do when they're told it's a simple laboratory tool.

White students perform worse on a test when they're told that Asian students do better. Girls do worse on a particular test when they're told ahead of time that boys are better at it. They all perform up to their potential, Steele concluded, when they don't envision a poor performance saying something about their group.

However, three university professors are touting what they call the Obama effect. They gave 20 questions from the Graduate Record Exam to a sample of Americans before and after the president was elected and found that although black people lagged their white counterparts before Nov. 4, the two groups were virtually tied when the test was given after the election.

Black people didn't become more intelligent during that span. But the research suggests that there was a boost in confidence and that the potential that was already there became realized when black test-takers had Obama's election to contemplate.

Even I, with all my optimism, didn't expect such an immediate effect, and who knows, further research may challenge some of the initial findings.

Still, when I say that Obama's presidency has the potential to be transformational, this is the kind of change I imagined: not a world where all killings cease, but a world where no children believe that a life of crime is their only option.

Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at 504.826.3355 or at jdeberry@timespicayune.com.